Tag: Donald Trump

I had plans for Tuesday night. I had a bottle of decent prosecco chilling in the fridge and a bottle of very nice single malt, a lovely gift from some friends, ready to celebrate. The day itself turned out stressful for other reasons, and by the time it was 5 pm I was extremely on edge and feeling unaccountably panicky. By 10 pm I was feeling quite sick. I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, and then on Wednesday morning I woke up to find myself a part of American Horror Story: Politics.

I believed the polls to the extent that the 25 to 35 percent chance of a Trump win bothered me; for those of you dismissing Nate Silver’s calculations as inaccurate, at no point did he discount a substantial possibility of Trump winning, even if it was never more than 50 percent. What I couldn’t believe as the vote came in was that so many women would tolerate a man such as Trump has shown himself to be–on camera, on the record, unfiltered–as president. I knew there were women who supported Trump, I saw them on television just like everyone else, I know a few personally, but I thought we had reached a stage as a country, as a culture, where a flat-out majority of women, regardless of race or ethnicity, had more respect for themselves than that. I have never been so bitterly disappointed to be wrong.

I don’t blame the Democratic party. I don’t think they’ve done a great job, I think Debbie Wasserman Schultz has done plenty of harm, but to believe that Bernie Sanders would have won where Hillary Clinton failed is to discount the common voiced again and again by conservative media and the conservatives I’ve spoken to personally that there is no daylight between socialist policies and Stalinism; that if we have universal, single-payer healthcare and repair our infrastructure and improve education, the next step is pogroms and gulags. You know, like they have in Denmark and the UK. It is also to discount the poisonous anti-Semitism that came out into the open during the months of Trump’s campaign. Having Sanders as a candidate wouldn’t have eliminated any of that.

I do blame the media, to an extent; I blame the thousands of hours given to obsession over emails that revealed very little more shocking than John Podesta’s recipe for creamy risotto and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Huma Abedin having a weakness for creme brulee. Clinton had already faced Congress a number of times over what happened in Benghazi, and then over the server; none of the recent so-called “revelations” brought to light anything substantial that wasn’t already known. Little time on television media platforms was given to covering each candidate’s policy proposals and actual political experience, and how these things would impact our lives in a practical sense. They could have done so much better. The thing is that we don’t force them to do better; we’re abandoning print media ostensibly because the online versions are cheaper and more convenient, but we don’t seem to be reading much of anything that delves deeply into facts. The problem isn’t that CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc., are feeding us poison; the problem is that they’ve become the ‘circus’ part of bread and circuses, alongside reality TV. There are still voices on each of the cable political stations worth listening to–Shep Smith, Rachel Maddow, Christiane Amanpour, Sally Kohn, Joy Reid–but no one hour of news coverage or commentary per day is going to be sufficient to present a full picture. The television news media found that we preferred name calling, demonstrations of shock and outrage, and fuzzy human interest stories to confronting uncomfortable facts and searching for constructive ways to resolve problems, and by god have they given it to us. Enough of it to drown a democracy. So yes, they may be to blame, but so are we every time we discount a story of what’s actually happening in favour of watching Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews spluttering in outrage over their offended sensibilities. It’s all well and good to remember how nice it was to grow up as white boys in places where most women stayed home and minorities were barely visible (if present at all), and secure jobs that paid enough to support a family were available the day after you graduated high school, for those who didn’t want to go to college. The constant indulgence in nostalgia for those experiences discounts everyone else whose opportunities were denied in order to make that life possible, and it doesn’t do a damn thing in the way of confronting the fact that technology has moved on, demographics have changed, the pressures and dangers we face now are wildly different, and people are no longer content to be pushed aside and suppressed so that straight white men can continue to dictate the terms of everyone’s existence. We don’t live in that world any more, and this desperate pretense that we can somehow go back there is causing us very real harm.

I cried a lot on Tuesday night and most of the day on Wednesday. I’ve had a few breakdowns since then. I argued with friends who tried to tell me that it’s not as bad as it looks, that Trump’s supporters want at heart the same things that I want–safety and security, and the freedom to live in peace. I argued because I’ve been watching for months as his supporters have targeted journalists who spoke out against Trump with anti-semitic attacks, images of their faces, their children’s faces, superimposed on images of gas chambers with Trump flicking the switch. Threats of rape, beatings, lynchings. Children being told by classmates that they’re going to be deported once Trump wins. The LGBTQ community now has a vice president who believes that their respective sexualities can be tortured out of them, and the fear that their right to marry, so recently and so hard won, may be taken away from them. Trump has threatened to repeal libel laws so that he can sue those who criticize him, and on Wednesday implied that he would require all Muslims to register with the government (because that’s never gone wrong before…). In my worst moments, I wonder about the prospect of violence and what could happen where I live, a predominately conservative neighbourhood in a predominately liberal city in what was, as of last Tuesday, an almost evenly divided state, if the voting reflects the state as a whole. The rest of the time I am worried mostly for my friends who are part of the LBGTQ community, who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, who are people of color. I am a heterosexual white woman; I’m not an obvious target to the people I fear, at least not yet. It is up to me, then, and the other women and men like me, to support those who are targets–to put ourselves between the people who are the targets of the bigotry Trump’s campaign has enabled and those who seek to do them harm. I’d like to think it would be enough for this shielding will take the form of arguments, protests, votes, and petitions, but given the people Trump is appointing to his transition team–including Peter Thiel, a man who has publicly expressed admiration for Apartheid–I wonder how soon we’re going to have to act as human shields.

By mid-Wednesday I started to feel better. Anxiety and grief take a very real physical toll on me; I find it hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, hard to sit still at times, and my body has a knack for producing physiological reactions to my emotions. I can’t afford any of that right now. I started to play more energetic songs that I liked, even if I didn’t feel like listening to them, and I started to map out what viable options are left to protect what I value in the face of a government that appears entirely committed to taking most of that away. I will renew my second passport, as that remains legal for now, but I have no intention of leaving at the moment. This is my home; moving our household overseas is not an appealing prospect for myself or my father, even if it remains an option. I believe that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, although I worry about how long it is going to be. I believe the rise of these nationalist governments is the death throes of a white, male-centered supremacy that sheer force of numbers is in the process of overwhelming; the question is how many people will it take with it before it dies out.

The media has now by and large taken the tone that as Trump is president-elect, we must accept and learn to work with him. I refuse to accept this in the sense of treating any of the policies he has threatened to impose on us as normal, as a simple conservative alternative to the progressive policies President Obama pursued. It drove my mother mad for years that the conservatives she knew refused to treat the president with the respect he was due as holder of the office because he was black, because he was liberal, because of his education; I am not willing to engage in similar hypocrisy. When Trump is inaugurated as President, I will be willing to call him such; I don’t think it’s of much use to dispute the legitimacy of the electoral college at this point, however little I like it. I will not engage in violent protest, and I will not condone or connive in others committing violent acts against Trump or his supporters. I will, however, continue to protest, in whatever ways I can. I will write letters. I will donate to causes supporting the rights that the GOP is threatening to take away from us. I will not stand silent if I witness someone being attacked for their faith or their sexuality or the color of their skin. If I can get to a protest or a march, I will participate, as I have done before. If any conservatives happen to be reading this (unlikely as that is)–to those who are mocking and insulting liberals for questioning whether they want to stay in the U.S., for wondering if our rights are going to be taken away, for fearing the worst is coming–if you’re wondering what hypocrisy looks like, take a long look in the mirror. Conservatives have been whining for years about Obama was coming for their guns, which never happened, and there were plenty of conservative media figures who *promised* they would leave when Obama was elected but didn’t. We’ve already witnessed reproductive rights being rolled back, by some of the same people Trump is bringing into his administration. We already have evidence that our fears our justified.

Things will get better. In two years we have a chance at taking back either the House or the Senate, if not both; in four years, if Medicare is privatized, Roe v. Wade overturned, the ACA repealed, gay marriage once again prohibited, journalists are silenced, if we’re in a trade war with China and NAFTA is repealed, all of which Trump and/or other Republican leaders have promised in the last months and weeks, I hope that the combination of those of us who are angry enough now and those who will have buyer’s remorse over voting for Trump will make a Democratic victory a certainty. The party does need work, but we have a number of strong candidates rising through the ranks. The problem is it will not get better in time for the women who are going to die or be left severely ill from botched abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned. For the people who are going to die all over the world as a result of accelerating climate change, from worsening economic inequality and the other financial consequences of lowering the U.S.’ tax rates across the board, from losing their health insurance, from any wars that Trump escalates or instigates. For the people who are going to die of their injuries after attacks by people who now believe that anyone they look down on is now fair game, as happened to a Saudi Arabian college student a couple of days ago.

This is the song that kept running through my mind on Tuesday morning, and I was so looking forward to posting it again and again, any excuse I could find, on Wednesday, instead of being unable to shake the lyrics of “This is not America”. This is the first political song I understood in political terms, being old enough to have a grasp, if not a full understanding, of the events that inspired it. I played it again and again back in 2008 following Barack Obama’s election, and I hope that I will get to irritate all and sundry with it the day after election day 2020, along with a clip of Daveed Diggs shouting “We Won We Won We Won We Won.” Because we will. I hope we will all be there to witness it.

My parents always referred to themselves as expatriates. They were both born in London, England, but met by chance in Atlanta, GA. Neither had planned on staying in the U.S., but that’s what they ended up doing, I assume because they had good jobs and were uninclined to cope with the financial upheaval of moving back–they were happy with their jobs, and a few years later Britain was grappling with the energy crisis (if there’s anything my mother hated, it was being cold). Eventually they had me, and bought a house, and here we stayed.

I read somewhere recently that people who take up residence in a new country refer to themselves as expatriates when they look down on the country they’ve come to, whereas self-described immigrants look up to and admire their new home. I never thought much about my parents’ preference for the word “expatriate” over “immigrant”. I doubt they considered it in any conscious sense–it has a ring to it, and evokes British colonialism in a way that they remained faintly (or very, in my father’s case) nostalgic for and makes me distinctly uncomfortable. My mother considered applying for citizenship at one time and studied for the exam, but never went through with it, because time or, later, physical energy was always lacking; my father has never wanted to. When I was growing up we listened to Garrison Keillor and watched every minute of Ken Burns’ The Civil War many times over, we celebrated Thanksgiving without fail and looked forward to the Boston Pops concert every July 4th, but the most important tastes and traditions in my household growing up were the ones they brought with them from England. Whenever my mother heard certain Americanisms creeping into my speech, she would correct me constantly until I stopped doing it, from saying “ben” instead of “been” when I was eight to interspersing every sentence with three or four ‘likes’ when I was fifteen. (Oddly, she never objected to me saying “Y’all”.)

I was born in Atlanta, and so the appellation “expatriate” has never applied to me. I never thought of myself as an immigrant either, or the child of immigrants, until I recently, but I always knew myself to be foreign, “not from around here” despite my birth. People recognized my accent as not local, but, unless one of my parents was with me, could rarely tell where it was from–some asked if I was Canadian, but most people assumed I was from up north. Until I corrected them, that is, as I’ve always been insufferably proud of my heritage. For a long time I wished I had been born in London like my parents, that I was fully English; but I did, after all, grow up here. I may be able to change my accent at will, but I can’t entirely eradicate either part of the blend, no matter how much I concentrate, and I no longer wish to. I am American as much as I am English.

I know what it is to be subject to xenophobia, albeit such experiences have been rare for me. I remember occasions growing up when my mother would be pointedly ignored by staff when we were out shopping. When I moved to Scotland I encountered a regular, if not universal, assumption that because I was American I wasn’t as prepared for university as everyone else, and that St Andrews lowered its standards in accepting students from the U.S. because we paid more in tuition. When I visited Japan, there was one occasion when I was standing in a queue to pay for food and the person behind me insisted on pushing the edge of the tray she was holding into my back, no matter how many times I stepped from one side or the other to get out of her way. These incidents were few and far between and by no means characteristic of the reception I’ve found wherever I’ve traveled, but few though they are I found them maddening, infuriating, sometimes to the point that they kept me up at night. I can’t imagine the frustration of having to live with such behavior on a daily and weekly basis; I’m not surprised that persistent racism has been linked to PTSD and other psychological disorders in PoC.

I started to think more carefully about the question of immigration and personal identity when I returned to the U.S. at the end of 2006 and endured the 2007 presidential election. I started hearing frequent references to the “real America”–a specific segment of the U.S. population distinguished by a particular income bracket and living in the land-locked parts of the U.S., or at least that’s what I thought the phrase meant the first few times I heard it. Its meaning seemed to morph and grow the more Sarah Palin and other politicians and media figures used it, and like a lot of such catchphrases, it was used more exclude than to include. The real America wasn’t the liberal strongholds in California and the east coast; the real America wasn’t respected universities and research institutions; the real America wasn’t communities where a significant percentage of the population spoke English as a second language, or had dual nationality, or retained any sort of multi-ethnic character. It didn’t include me (liberal elitist, apparently), or many of my friends (not white or not Christian or, like me, liberal elitist). Palin lost the election for McCain, but the idea persisted, under different names, taking on additional implications. Mitt Romney’s dismissal of the “47%” who would vote for President Obama in the 2012 election revived the idea, giving it different parameters–which bore little resemblance to his technical definition of this group as those who don’t pay income tax, as most of the states with the highest populations of non-payers are reliably red states, not blue ones. Now we have Trump, and the “real” America–the Americans who want to “make America great again”–is predominately white, Christian, and heterosexual. Where does that leave us, the “not real” Americans, who still comprise a majority even as the race grows a little tighter?

I fit the definition of the so-called “anchor baby”. My parents were never citizens, and when they arrived in the U.S. they had high-school educations. However, no one ever accused them of being under-achieving or lazy. They had high-paying jobs that could, after all, have gone to U.S. citizens, but no one ever accused them of “stealing American jobs”. No one ever hissed or shouted at us to go back where we came from. This is what white privilege is; in a crowd I am accepted, whereas people who can’t–or have no desire to–conceal their accent or the color of their skin or their hair are not. People of color, from various backgrounds and heritages, are every day told to go back where they came from, that their parents must have been engaged in illegal activities to earn a living, that they don’t belong here, even when in many cases they were born here, as I was, or come from families who have been American citizens for generations, centuries. Now there is talk of rescinding birthright citizenship, which would make me and everyone else whose parents came and remained here legally, never breaking any laws or avoiding any taxes, no longer Americans in fact as as well as in the minds of Trump’s supporters. I find this monstrous, coming as it does from the mouths of politicians and members of the public who constantly criticize the President, democrats, and liberals alike for not understanding or respecting the Constitution.

The backlash against Barack Obama snowballed, as calls grew for immigration reform, as gay people were granted the right to marry, as our arts and culture began to better represent the country’s demographic reality. Now the backlash has gained not just a local habitation but a name: the alt-right. The people comprising this group are not by definition Trump supporters, nor do I imagine that all Trump supporters would define themselves as alt-right, but there is a significant and frankly quite frightening overlap between the two. The past few months have brought a barrage of defensive pundits, Trump supporters, and Trump surrogates–not to mention a broad variety of thinkpieces from left and right alike–insisting that Trump’s popularity is rooted in the economic grievances of working-class Americans. If I hear one more such tirade I think I’ll scream. I know that the ramifications of the Great Recession and economic policy over the last several decades has fueled a great deal of this bitterness. What I would like some of the people writing these thinkpieces and arguing this point in the media to acknowledge is that while financial strain may have been the spark, the tinder and now the fuel is a strong desire to return to the America before Obergefell v. Hodges, before Roe v. Wade, before the Civil Rights Act. I do not hear Trump supporters on television discussing the complexity of U.S. tax law and how it has given major corporations and manufacturers incentives to move jobs overseas, where they can pay their workers less, or admitting the damage that trickle-down economics has done. They do not discuss how Donald and Ivanka Trump have taken advantage of the cheap labour available overseas to increase their own profits from their clothing and fashion lines. Instead they talk about building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, complain about NAFTA as though it Bill Clinton was responsible for it (he wasn’t–it was George H. W. Bush who signed the treaty), and suggest instigating a trade war with China. There is a lot of heated discussion about severely reducing or stopping immigration (from some countries) and doing more to deport those who have arrived in this country illegally, but I’ve yet to hear Trump or any of his surrogates present a practical policy proposal to do this. Many of Trump’s suggestions over the past few months have been just as irrational and ridiculous as the idea of having open borders, but any time this point is made in the media it is dismissed as ‘liberal bias’ rather than a reflection of a decent grasp of policy, law, and economics.

Trump and his son Eric have many times retweeted and reposted comments and slurs against Hillary Clinton and a variety of other targets that originated from white supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts. Trump, despite crowing about how ‘the blacks’ love him, last week noticed a black supporter of his in the audience at a rally, called him a thug, and had him removed. The man hadn’t said anything; the color of his skin was enough to identify him as an enemy. There’s a bumper sticker of a figure representing the confederate flag delivering a roundhouse kick to another figure representing the pride flag, the image of which is making the rounds on the Internet. Anti-Semitic harassment of journalists and anyone who doesn’t support Trump have surged, particularly online. Kurt Eichenwald found himself the subject of a barrage of attacks and harassment when he began reporting on the many questionable aspects of Trump’s personal, financial, and business history, including one email that included a flashing image capable of inducing an epileptic seizure (Eichenwald has been very open about his struggle with the disorder). A politician who considered running against Trump decided against it after receiving images of his adopted daughter superimposed on pictures of gas chambers and other violent scenarios. Children are being harassed at school, and some schools have cancelled classes for the day of the election. These attacks aren’t manifestations of the desire for greater economic equality; they are the product of racial and ethnic hatred, a belief that being white, Christian, and heterosexual makes a person superior to any one with a differing skin color, creed, or sexuality.

I’m tired of hearing how American was founded as a Christian nation, and thus everyone should say “Merry Christmas” to all and sundry during the holiday season, school children should be required to recite Christian prayers, and the Ten Commandments should be posted on the wall in courtrooms. The founding fathers also lived in a world where it was taken for granted that only white men had the right to vote, where it was legal to enslave other people based on the color of their skin, and Native Americans were often as not ignored or massacred if they got in the way of what the U.S. government decided to do on American land. The America that exists today would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers–we have cars and smartphones and medical practices that would be tantamount to miracles to someone from the 18th century; women vote, being gay is no longer a crime or a form of madness, and slavery is illegal. (I guess the “ignoring Native Americans” part hasn’t changed much.) Quite frankly, I find the idea that people are nostalgic for a time when women were second-class citizens and people of color barely citizens at all rather nauseating. Every nation, every culture has committed wrongs that it must come to terms with, accept responsibility for; reverting to the conditions that gave rise to those wrongs is not going to make anything better. The United States is not the same place it was in 1775–not geographically, not demographically, not technologically, not environmentally. What this country has always done right is the struggle to fully manifest the words of the Declaration of Independence: that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are self-evident and inalienable. The alt-right is the latest manifestation of the idea that these rights are not self-evident and inalienable, but can be denied based on one’s skin color, sexual orientation, religion, gender, and apparently, in some minds, the birthplace of one’s parents. If that is the Real America, if Trump wins the election next Tuesday, I am alarmed to think of what might happen to the millions of Americans who don’t fit into that mould, me and most of those I hold dear among them.